About this artwork

An inscription on the back of this sheet states that this head was used by Palma in an altarpiece showing John the Baptist that was destined for a church in Serinalta (Palma’s home town) near Bergamo. No such painting survives. The drawing is in fact almost certainly a self-portrait, with the figure twisting his neck to peer into a mirror in order to capture his own reflection. The features are very similar to those of two probable painted self-portraits by Palma. In Palma’s portraits of other figures, the sitter is invariably presented to the viewer with his or her torso angled less sharply into the picture space.

Opinion is divided as to whether this lively and engaging study is actually a self-portrait by Palma, but the arguments in favour are strong. The angle of the head in relation to the torso can readily be understood in terms of the artist gazing over his shoulder at a mirror while recording his impressions on a sheet of paper directly in front of him. In Palma’s painted portraits of other sitters, their torsos are invariably less sharply angled into the picture space. The young man’s gaze in the drawing is also penetrating and intensely analytical in a manner often encountered in self-portraiture. Further support for this identi cation is provided by the physiognomic resemblance of the sitter to two probable painted self-portraits dating from late in the artist’s career, one sketched on the back of a Portrait of a Woman in the Contini Bonacossi collection (Galleria degli U zi, Florence), the other in the train of the magi in an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi with Saint Helen, commissioned in 1525 and now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

Giorgio Vasari, author of the famous Lives of the Painters, stated that Palma Vecchio was forty eight at the time of his death, which would give a birth date of 1479–80. If it is accepted that the sitter here appears to be about thirty years old, that would imply a date of around 1510 for the drawing. There was a well-established tradition in Venice of black chalk portrait drawings of this kind, but the technical freedom of this study, particularly the sketchy handling of the hair, neck and collar, is exceptional for that date.

The artist, perhaps not long arrived in Venice from his native Bergamo region, exudes an air of quiet confi dence and determination. With Giorgione, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo, he was one of the key players who brought about a revolution in Venetian painting over the first two decades of the sixteenth century. Palma’s most distinctive contributions to this transformation were his paintings of belle donne – beautiful, often scantily clad, young women – and his Holy Families with Saints in idyllic landscape settings, although he also produced more conventional altarpieces and portraits.
The inscription on the back of this sheet is in the hand of Carlo Ridol , the well-known Venetian writer on art, whose Le Maraviglie dell’arte, published in 1648, includes a biography of Palma Vecchio. However, the information the inscription supplies – to the effect that a painted version of this head appeared in an altarpiece of Saint John the Baptist in Palma Vecchio’s home town of Serina – appears to be spurious; the inscriptions and attributions on many other drawings owned by Ridol are equally unreliable.

This text was originally published in Facing the World: Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei, 2016.

Palma Vecchio

Palma Vecchio

Palma specialised in pictures that were destined for a domestic context, such as female beauties and reclining nudes, and scenes of Holy Families with Saints in a landscape. He also painted a number of altarpieces for churches in Venice, the Veneto and his native Lombardy. With Giorgione and Titian, Palma…